As companies seek individuals who can work anywhere in the world, plenty of U.S. business schools claim they’re “going global,” adding weeklong jaunts to China, Korea or Brazil and increasing the share of international students in their classes.

But that’s not enough to train tomorrow’s leaders, argues Pankaj Ghemawat, a professor of global strategy at IESE Business School in Barcelona. In order to prepare students for a global business environment, he says, schools must do a better job explaining globalization—and its many limits.

Mr. Ghemawat, 53 years old, recently served on a task force coordinated by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, an industry accrediting group, to offer recommendations on how schools can teach the complex topic.

He spoke with The Wall Street Journal about his suggestions, which include rethinking those business-school trips and finding lessons in Big Macs.

Edited excerpts:

WSJ: How do business schools currently demonstrate their global offerings?

Mr. Ghemawat: A lot of the emphasis falls on experiential mechanisms [trips], particularly those associated with getting a diverse group of people together and taking them to interesting locations. This seems to be one of the few areas of business education that there is such vagueness about what we are trying to teach.

WSJ: Do those trips add any value?

Mr. Ghemawat: There’s little or no permanent effect of something that short, in terms of really opening people up to other realities. If it’s all that the faculty will allow, a week or two weeks has a somewhat higher chance of success if you give people some orientation around cross-country differences before they set off on their excellent adventure.

I just worry that a week in an emerging market might almost be worse than doing nothing because it leaves people with a false sense of knowledge.

WSJ: How should globalization be taught?

Mr. Ghemawat: We need to start with an accurate handle on how globalized the world is. [In my class,] we use power-voting devices and students guess the percentage of phone calls accounted for by international calls. The actual percentage of voice-calling minutes that are international is 2%. Students will often guess higher than 40%, a pretty big distortion.

If the world were completely integrated, it would be one giant country and we wouldn’t need any [instruction] on globalization.

[At IESE] we use this interlock model, where there’s a platform course—the 12-session course that I teach—and then we coordinate with other teachers to make sure these concepts don’t stay confined in that course.

WSJ: So it’s not about exposing them to the extent of globalization, but rather to its limits?

Mr. Ghemawat: Students have been reared on a diet of globalization, globalization, globalization. It’s very helpful to confront them with reality.

It’s hard to think of another food product that is purveyed in close to the same form, by the same vendor, worldwide as something like the Big Mac. If we can find variation in this extreme case, it is plausible that it applies across the board. There’s the McArabia in the United Arab Emirates, Shogun burgers in Hong Kong, McShawarma in Israel. [McDonald’s] are the most standardized guys out there, so if they’re engaging in so much variation, the chances for the typical vendor to say, “No, we’re going to sell exactly the same thing [everywhere],” seems a little bit remote.

In my class we do a case on Grolsch, a beer company. [Students say,] “We’ve heard of the beer, they’re present in 50 countries, they seem to be doing pretty well.” Financially, they’re actually doing pretty badly. We talk about why they do relatively well close to home, and very poorly the farther away they get from home. There’s a lot of stuff you have to think about: how you’re going to handle distribution arrangements, how much you change the marketing, was it a good idea to build your new brewery inland just because that’s where you’ve always been, when you’re actually targeting export markets for growth? It’s a truly cross-functional case where students start to see that it’s [globalization’s limitations are] not trivial, even if you’ve got a great product.

WSJ: What are the business implications if schools don’t start addressing the nuances of globalization?

Mr. Ghemawat: We won’t have made much progress from decades ago, when there was a tendency toward one-size-fits-all biases: “I’m going to go forth and assume that the world’s like home, until I stub my toe really badly. Then maybe I’ll pay attention.”

Teaching [more] about globalization is a way of taking some of that learning offline, because stubbing your toe can be very expensive in corporate terms.

Companies need to evaluate cross-border decisions, rather than just do it. They need to rethink their strategies for overseas, rather than say that just because it worked at home it’s going to work overseas. Once you start believing the world is flat, none of these are really difficult decisions—you should be everywhere. But in practical fact, less than 5% of U.S. multinationals operate in more than 20 countries. Where to compete is still a relevant decision.

WSJ: You’ve now shared your findings with a number of business schools. Are they receptive?

Mr. Ghemawat: There are some signs of acceptance, though it’s going to be relatively slow, especially in the U.S. A lot of it has to do with the usual things you see in international business: if your home market is large, you’re naturally late to globalize. So if you’re in the U.S., it’s a little bit easier to forget, from time to time, that there’s a whole world out there.

We don’t have a hegemonic nationality in Barcelona [at IESE]. Twenty percent of my students are Spanish, but that’s not really enough to impose their views.

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Written and edited by The Wall Street Journal’s Management & Careers group, At Work covers life on the job, from getting ahead to managing staff to finding passion and purpose in the office. Tips, questions? email us.